Lost in the Sun (8 page)

I could only hear her a little while I pulled the potpies out of the freezer and started up the oven. She was canceling plans, probably with her friend Barbara, from her book club. Part of me felt bad for being such a terrible delinquent that my own mother had to cancel the one night to herself she'd probably planned in eons. Aaron would glare at me for sure, if he knew. But then I realized that if my mom was canceling plans, that meant she'd
made
plans. On a night the Dodgers were playing the
Giants,
second in a series after a losing game. As far as I knew, Mom hadn't missed a single game against the Giants since the day she was born.

I was going to ask about it when she came back into the living room. But she was smiling, really smiling, and she looked happy as
she flicked through the channels to the game and said, “Ready to pummel some Giants, Trent?” She pulled our two baseball caps from the coat rack and smooshed mine onto my head.
“Let's go, let's go, let's go!”
she hollered.

And I wasn't about to mess up a good mood like that. So I didn't say anything at all.

Sunday morning Mom let me go with her to the store. I guess she figured I'd already missed out on going to Dad's for the weekend anyway, plus I could tell she was feeling pretty happy after we pummeled the Giants the night before (there was nothing that made Mom happier than pummeling the Giants—not even coffee). So she decided I might as well make a couple bucks working.

“Trent!” Ray greeted me when we walked into the store. “Good to see you.”

“There's one for you in here,” I said, holding out the bag of doughnuts. I guess it was becoming a regular thing, Mom getting an extra doughnut for Ray on the weekends, because Calvin at the doughnut shop didn't even blink this time when I asked for it.

“Chocolate glazed,” he said, peering into the bag, then back up at me. “My favorite person.”

I laughed. “You sound just like Mom,” I told him.

It was pretty slow at the store, so I spent most of the morning drawing in my Book of Thoughts.

One of the pictures I drew was a good one, maybe my best yet. Me in my house, on that cold February day, right after Doug came inside with his friend Brad and told me that the guys at the lake needed another hockey player. It looked pretty close to how it had happened in real life. Only in the drawing, as soon as I tossed the skates over my shoulder to go outside, one of the blades hit the wall behind me and snapped off. Broke, right in two. Unusable. And everyone knew you couldn't play hockey with only one skate.

“How are your thoughts?” Mom asked, sliding onto the stool next to me. She didn't try to sneak a peek at my book. Mom didn't do that.

“Fine,” I said, closing the book.

She nodded. “How's school?”

Well, let's see, I thought. My homeroom teacher hates me. My gym teacher hates me. I hate everyone else. But at least I don't spend lunch in the bathroom anymore.

“Fine,” I said.

“You making friends?”

I guess Fallon counted as a friend, if you didn't mind that she was half wacko. “Yep,” I told her.

Mom smiled at me. A real, Giants-pummeling smile. Then she slipped my Dodgers cap onto my head. I don't know where she'd been hiding it. “Excellent,” she said. She nodded toward my closed Book of Thoughts. “Now stop all that thinking you're doing, because it's time for serious things.” She put on her own cap, then pulled the radio out
from under the counter. “Ray!” she shouted across the store. Our only two customers whipped their heads around, but Mom didn't seem to care. “It's starting!”

I stashed my Book of Thoughts under the counter. The third game in the series against the Giants was not something to be missed.

It was a rough game, tight the whole way through, but going into the ninth we were up 3 to 1. Which is of course when the Dodgers' idiot closer came in, walked the bases loaded, and then gave up a bases-clearing double. So in the bottom of the ninth we were losing 4 to 3.

With men on second and third, Mom and Ray and I all had our rally caps on (which were just our regular baseball caps flipped inside out) when they announced who was stepping up to the plate.

“Come on, Slumps McGhee!”
Mom hollered at the radio. (“Slumps McGhee” was her favorite nickname for any player having an off week.)
“You can do it! We all believe in you!”
She was standing in front of her stool, clutching the sides of the counter. A couple of customers were up at the front and shouting, too. I was pretty sure some people had left the store when they heard all the shouting and stomping, but it didn't look like Ray and Mom cared too much at that point.

All we needed was a single to win the game.

“You can do it!”
Mom screeched again. I held my breath.

The guy struck out.

The Giants won.

“Nooooo!”
Mom screamed, falling back onto her stool.

“You've
got
to be kidding me!” Ray shouted.

Me, I just whipped off my baseball cap. Tossed it onto the counter and turned to the customer in front of me, who was holding two whisks. “I'll ring you up,” I told him.

I didn't even know why I bothered getting my hopes up about anything anymore.

•   •   •

I thought the Dodgers getting pummeled by the Giants that afternoon was going to be the worst thing that happened that day.

It wasn't.

Aaron cornered me as soon as we got home.

“Doug's going to prank you,” he told me, checking over his shoulder to make sure that Mom was safely in the kitchen and couldn't hear. Pranking was still completely off-limits.

I hung up my useless Dodgers cap on the rack by the wall. “Why's he trying to prank
me
?” I asked. “I thought he was trying to get you.”

Aaron smiled at that. “I guess he figured it's useless trying to prank the master. Anyway, he said he's mad at you because you keep ruining all his best pranks.”

“Doug ruins them all by himself,” I said. “He's just mad because I won't help him.”

“Regardless,”
Aaron went on (sometimes Aaron liked to use big words because he thought it made him sound smarter, but it didn't, because he always emphasized them a lot so you'd be sure to hear exactly how smart he was), “we're going to reverse-prank him.”

“We are?”

“Let's go to your room and I'll give you the scoop.”

This was the scoop: Doug was going to put hot sauce in my food
at dinner. That was it. That was Doug's whole big prank. But obviously, because he was Doug and he was terrible at pranks, he'd gone and made the thing as complicated as possible. Which was why he'd turned to Aaron for help.

“So first I have to help him convince Mom that he's going to cook dinner for the entire family, simply out of the goodness of his heart,” Aaron told me, rolling his eyes.

“She's going to be suspicious for sure,” I said.

“It's not a great plan,” Aaron admitted. “But it wouldn't be a Doug prank if it was a good plan.”

“True.”

“So he's going to make soup,” Aaron continued.

“And put the hot sauce in my bowl,” I figured. It was too obvious, really. “So what's the reverse prank?”

“Simple,” Aaron said. “After Doug puts the hot sauce in your bowl, I'm going to secretly switch it with
his.
He'll be so eager to see you burn your tongue off that when you just eat it, no problem, he'll be really freaked out.”

“And then,” I said, catching on, “when he goes for his
own
bowl, steam will come out his ears and he'll lose his mind. And he won't even be able to say anything, or he'll get in trouble for pulling pranks.”

“Precisely.”

It wasn't a bad reverse-prank, really. And on Doug, it would definitely work.

“I'm in,” I told Aaron.

•   •   •

I decided to spend the rest of the time until dinner attempting to sort of live up to being the great-at-school non-screw-up my mom thought I
was turning into, so I stayed in my room and tackled some math homework. It wasn't too hard. When Doug came home from Dad's, I heard him holler at Aaron, “I bought lots of soup! Don't tell Trent!” Which probably would've ruined the prank if it hadn't been ruined already. I just got up and shut my door so I wouldn't hear anything else and Doug would still think his prank was running smoothly. I didn't come out until Mom shouted at me that it was time to set the table.

“What's for dinner?” I asked as I came into the kitchen. Playing it totally cool. Doug was at the stove stirring an enormous pot of soup with a wooden spoon, a potholder on each hand. He pushed me away with the spoon, flicking me all over with soup dribbles.

“It's a surprise,” he told me. “Get away.”

Mom laughed from where she stood at the counter, inspecting a salad I guess Doug had been making. It looked like bagged lettuce with some salad dressing poured over the top. “Doug insisted on making dinner himself tonight. Isn't that sweet?”

I squinted at Mom for a moment, to see if she actually thought it was sweet or was just humoring him. She definitely didn't know about the prank, I decided.

“The sweetest,” I told her. There were seven empty cans of chicken noodle in the recycling bin. So no need to guess what kind of soup we were having.

“Now why don't
you
be the sweetest,” she said, “and help set the table? Aaron, you're on napkins.”

“Aye, aye!” Aaron replied with a salute.

While Aaron and I set the table, and Doug stirred his soup, Mom
put two loaves of Italian bread in the oven to heat. Everyone was in such a good mood, laughing and talking and having a good time, that I was actually starting to look forward to the reverse prank.

And then I heard the voice from the hallway behind me.

“Doug, I didn't see the badger anywhere,” the voice said. “Maybe you lost it.”

I whirled around.

Standing there, in my own home, was a short little squirt of a girl. Brown hair, bangs, wearing white-flowered shorts and a shirt with dogs all over it.

Annie Richards.

I gripped my hands into tight fists, and did my best to breathe normally. What was
she
doing here?

“What's
he
doing here?” Annie asked, glaring at me. Her hands were gripped into tight fists, too.

“I thought you knew he was going to be . . . ,” Doug said slowly. He seemed confused.

Annie kept glaring at me. Wouldn't look away. “I thought we were doing it to your other brother,” she said.

“Doing what?” Mom asked.

I could tell Aaron was just as surprised about Annie being there as I was. He grabbed the wooden spoon from Doug, to help with the stirring. “Boy, this soup sure smells good!” he said a little too cheerfully.

Doug was biting his lip as he glanced from Annie to me, both of us with our fists clenched tight. He looked really upset. Probably worried that his big, wonderful prank was going to be ruined. “It'll be
fun,” he told Annie. Practically begging her. “I promise. Please, you
have
to stay.”

“I could use some help tossing the salad,” Mom said to Annie.

Annie turned to Doug and tugged at the ends of her hair for a bit, like she was busy making up her mind. “Okay,” she finally said, and Doug let out a deep breath. She moved to the counter to help my mom with the salad.

“Wonderful,” Mom told her, giving her a squeeze around the side.

I guess I was the only one who wished Annie Richards would leave. The way she looked at me—like she
knew,
and she hated me for it—I didn't like it. Not at all. Because I couldn't blame her, for looking at me like that. That's the way I'd look at me, too, if I were her.

When the salad was tossed and on the table, and the bread was warmed, and Doug finally declared the soup stirred enough for his satisfaction, he told us all to sit down. “I'm the server,” he told us. “I'll bring you your soup.”

“Let me just put the pot on the table,” Mom said. “Our bowls are already here.”

“No!” Doug shouted, too quickly. “I mean, that won't work. It's like a restaurant, it needs to be like a restaurant.”

Aaron was doing his best not to laugh. “I'll help,” he said, and he picked up two bowls off the table and brought them to Doug at the stove. “Everybody stay seated. Doug is the chef and I'll be the waiter.” He winked at me.

“What nice boys I have,” Mom said.

I made my way to my seat, and so did Annie. She sat as far from me as she possibly could, glaring at me the whole time. I folded and unfolded the edge of my napkin, doing my best to pretend I couldn't see her.

“No one eat till I get there!” Doug shouted at us as Aaron brought the first two bowls of soup to Mom and Annie. “I want to see everyone eat it!”

“Are chefs supposed to be so bossy?” Mom asked. But I noticed she didn't touch her soup.

If anyone ever doubted that Doug was the worst pranker in the history of the universe, the job he did getting the hot sauce into the soup would've proved it. Mom couldn't see, because lucky for Doug she was sitting a bad angle and attempting to have a conversation with Annie besides. But I had a perfect view of Doug ladling out the last bowl of soup, then making Aaron walk to the fridge with him, then taking out the giant bottle of hot sauce, then slowly, slowly tearing off the plastic on the lid (he hadn't even taken the plastic off the lid yet? Doug
really
needed some work on his pranking), then hiding behind the fridge door while he dumped it in. “That one's for Trent,” he told Aaron. Didn't even bother to whisper it.

I couldn't tell what Aaron said to Doug then, because he was better at whispering than Doug was, but it seemed like he told him to sit down at the table without him while he stirred the hot sauce into the bowl. I'm guessing that's what he said, anyway, because Doug came to the table then, and Aaron got a spoon from the drawer and quick stirred the soup.

Aaron put one bowl in front of me, and one at Doug's place. “Bon appétit,” he told me as he sat.

“Thank you so much for this delicious meal,” Mom said to Doug.

“You're welcome!” he replied happily. His eyes were glued to me.

Annie's eyes were glued to me, too. If glaring was a subject in school, she'd have an A+. Heck, she could teach the class.

Mom started digging into her bowl right away, with super-loud
mm!
s and
delicious!
es to make Doug feel good about his soup stirring. But Doug and Annie and Aaron were all focused on me and my bowl of soup.

I made a big show of it. If I was in for a reverse prank, I was going to be
all
in. I unclenched my fists and then rolled up my sleeves, one at a time.

And I reached for my spoon.

“You want some bread?” Aaron asked me just as I dipped my spoon into the bowl.